She stepped into the particle shower and let it clean the streaks of blood and smoke grime from her body when she froze. Jessie had shaved.
She ran out to the pod and looked closer but it was impossible to tell if there were other differences, he was still fully clothed and the fluid made him blurry and indistinct. He’d never shaved before but he’d found Scarlet. Maybe they had been together for a while and she’d cajoled him into getting rid of the scraggly thing where he had ignored her suggestions.
On the fourth day he was healed enough she could move him a little and not be concerned with damaging him further. She carefully pulled off his battered leather jacket and unbuckled his guns. They weren’t the blasters; they were earth guns. A slow sinking feeling started in her stomach and she felt the dread return. She knew the meaning of the word but now she understood it. She felt it. He looked younger, the lines around his eyes were gone. The scar that ran across his hairline wasn’t there. The burn scar from a medallion in the palm of his hand was missing and so was the locket he always wore around his neck. She stripped him of the rest of his clothes. He was crisscrossed with scars, bullet wounds and knife gashes but he was missing a few.
This wasn’t Jessie. This was the boy.
She took all the dangerous things out of the house and stored them in the ship, ignoring his orders never to enter his rooms. The boy could hurt himself or destroy the integrity of the building. She changed the codes on the door leading to the airlock so he couldn’t accidentally kill himself. She sealed the windows with armored shutters then settled down to wait. She hoped Jessie would find some way to get back before the boy awoke, she didn’t know what to do with him. He knew their coordinates, maybe he could use the original time machine.
The pod working on Scarlet had finally determined a way to cleanse her body of the invading zombie virus. She’d had to readjust it like she had for Jessie so it didn’t purge the clean part of the serum, the parts that made her a little bit super. She didn’t want to strip the girl of her advantages. Her speed and reflexes.
The boy’s pod beeped, letting her know he would be finished in 24 hours. He opened his eyes and stared at her when she quieted the timer and she was afraid. She didn’t know what to do.
48
Training
She put him in the room where Jessie slept and let him wake up alone. She’d removed all of her clothes because she wasn’t sure what to expect. She wanted to be able to shift to any form at any time, even an encompassing blanket to hold him still if he had a mental breakdown and started trying to smash the hull or hurt himself. She shifted her form to mimic clothing. It was hard, her body wanted to stay a body.
When he awoke, he thought she was Scarlet and she chastised herself. It was her normal form and it was difficult to remain looking like someone different for very long. She should have tried though, at least at first.
He was obstinate and hard headed and when he’d ignored her advice, when he’d tried to force open the airlock, she had gotten angry and shown him who she was. Embarrassed, she retreated to the ship and wondered what was next. Why had Jessie done this? What did he want her to do? Was she supposed to send them back after they were healed? The boy had been on deaths doorstep, even with the serum in his veins. He should have left him to die and came back himself. But what if he couldn’t? Her mind went back to thoughts of him lying dead in a burning building, his last act had been to save the pair.
She felt another new emotion as she stared through the windshield. Self-pity. When they first met, she had decided to help Jessie. Her prime directive was to preserve human life. He was the first human she’d encountered in ten thousand years and she made it her duty to keep him safe. This boy wasn’t Jessie but technically he was. She was as bound to him as she had been to her Jessie and she resented it. She couldn’t take her bracelet and jump back to his last coordinates. The unyielding hard coded part of her wouldn’t let her. She owed loyalty to Jessie and his wishes. He had saved her from spending eternity drifting through space in endless hibernation cycles but this seemed like too much to ask.
When she went back inside he was calm and sorting through Jessie’s journals. She was resentful at first, he had no right but the boy wanted to know who had saved him and she relented. She wanted him to know. She wanted him to realize how much had been sacrificed, how hard Jessie had worked to find Scarlet and how he’d thrown it all away to save him, the pale imitation of a great man.
As the days passed she started to understand why Jessie had sent him. He was young and naive but he had all of the same qualities. He was hard headed and stubborn. Obstinate and driven. He wasn’t jaded, not yet, and if the only way to save Scarlet was to send her across time then it only made sense to send the boy she loved to be with her, not the ancient man who had lived thousands of years.
She started being nicer to him and was overjoyed when she learned they had spoken before Jessie sent him here. The joy quickly turned to sorrow when he’d been ordered to destroy the
